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Combat Overview

Successful combat will balance elements such as hitboxes, timing, speed, positioning, power, hit-priority, and defensive and offensive technique. Individual character movelists can be (eventually) found in their respective section, entitled Characters. This section will discuss some of the overall goals of combat for the game, and its players.

General Combat

Global Movesets, Hitboxes, Speed, Power, Priority

Global Movesets

A - Spammable, low risk low return. Less damage but fast moves that should result in a low impact to the opponent.

B - Stronger, but larger investment. Higher risk.

C - Largest risk, largest return. May also contain mobility moves.

Overview

During combat, players will be making split second decisions in order to determine which move, or sequence of movements they will be performing. A large part of this decision making will come from knowledge of the balance of the four elements listed above. In this section, each element will be broken down and discussed in detail, and the relationships between the other elements established to define the basic rules for balance, which will be applied later in applicable programming.

Hitboxes

Definitions:Hitbox is the word used to describe the section of a move or character that is capable of hitting, or being hit by, other moves or players.Disjointed Hitbox usually refers to a move or weapon attack that is itself invulnerable to counterattack, as it is a move performed by the player, but the hitbox of the move is separated from the actual character sprite, meaning any attack against it would be useless at the very least, damaging at the worst.

General Overview:
In the context of this game, hitboxes are a good enough reference for the concepts of collision.
1) When two hit boxes collide, the one with more attack priority wins.
2) In the case of an equal priority collision, there is a clash.
3) If the hit boxes carry no attack priority, the objects pass through each other.

How is Priority different from Damage?
Priority determines which of two conflicting attacks will land. Damage is the resulting amount of damage taken from the move that won the exchange. Damage may help determine priority, but it is certainly not the only factor.

What determines the priority of a move?

When two attacking hitboxes collide, as long as one or both of the moves are not disjointed, then a priority check has to take place to determine the results of the exchange.

At the point of collision, a check is made based on the location of the collision on each of the moves animation, as well as which frame the animation is on. These factors determine damage and priority, as the hitboxes scale in both of these things throughout the animation of the move. Whichever move has higher priority at the point of collision wins, and the value of damage is dealt to the losing party.

A hitbox will not always carry the same priority throughout a move. Often times, a move will scale in speed, priority, and damage throughout its duration. In many cases, there are moves that have moments of nearly complete vulnerability, and in others, moments of nearly complete invulnerability .

Relationships:

Hitboxes are strongly tied with the speed, and priority of a move. If the move is high in speed, priority, and damage, with a large attack hitbox, it would be considered a very powerful move. If the active damage hitbox of this move is small, leaving the rest of the character sprite vulnerable, this would be an example of how to balance the high speed and priority of the move.

Moves with high speed and priority, but with small attack hitboxes and large vulnerable hitboxes, usually require advanced timing or positioning, often both.

Some moves may be balanced by restricting the attack priority of the move, so that it is only high during certain frames. These moves also require advanced timing, and positioning.

Some moves have high attack priority and sped, but low power. These moves are often considered "pokes" or "setup moves".

Timing can overthrow priority. Certain moves may have "sweet spots", where their priority is, very briefly, very high. Perfect timing can be used to stump an otherwise higher averaged priority attack.

Speed

Power

Priority

Timing, Positioning, Defensive and Offensive Technique

Timing

A major goal of this game is to require that players develop a better sense of timing and sequencing of their moves, in an attempt to limit the prototypical large technical learning curve of most fighting games. This means that many of the mechanics of this game are based around this sense of timing.

A large part of the game is jumping and attacking. Timing the arial move so that the character is close to finishing the move before they land on the ground will reward the player with faster recovery time. A way to accelerate a players movement is to successfully time the moves so that part of the lag time is canceled by the landing of the character. This will require the player to learn the length and strengths of the moves, and also their weaknesses and penalties for mistiming a landing.

Utilizing your defensive shield with proper timing will also yield a more effective defense. Perfect timing on defense can mitigate almost all damage, or even create an opening in the opponents attacks.

Timing is therefore very closely related to offensive and defensive techniques.